Dear Booksellers,

Top Ten Things to Do Today

1. Vote! We really want to hear from members about the ABA Board’s proposed bylaws changes. Your vote matters and your participation helps us help you. Please take five minutes to vote here. The extended deadline for these votes is 11:59 p.m ET Monday, 11/23/20. 

2. Bookmark the IndieCommerce status page. If you experience a website outage this is the first place to check to determine whether IndieCommerce knows there is an issue.  For example, yesterday afternoon there was an IC outage for approximately 35 minutes. The outage was caused by one of our hosting services that pushed an update, without our knowledge, that crashed the platform. Stores that checked the status page were kept in the loop. 

3. Review IndieCommerce Help information:
   Regular Business Hours
   Monday - Friday, 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. ET: For IndieCommerce customer support ONLY please contact [email protected] or (914) 406-7500 (option 2) or (800) 637-0037 (option 2). For general questions please be patient; like you, the IndieCommerce team is handling unprecedented e-commerce volume!
   Weekends, Holidays & After Hours
   Saturdays, Sundays, holidays, and after-hours coverage: We monitor for emergency issues only.
   For Emergency IndieCommerce & IndieLite Issues
   An emergency issue means that your customers can't buy anything from your website or your staff can't process any online orders. Your website is essentially broken and cannot take orders or process any transactions. If your website has an emergency issue please check the IndieCommerce status page first. If your issue has not been reported submit a critical outage report and staff will be alerted immediately.

4. Shut your computers down. Rebooting your computer periodically will shut down programs running in the background that can gobble up RAM and slow down your computer. (Shutting down will also protect your machine from a power surge caused by a thunderstorm and lightning strikes.)

5. Be prepared for a shutdown. Thanks to NEIBA for this great shutdown checklist.

6. Check out ABA’s final holiday marketing assets of the year for bookstores to use to promote shopping local for the holidays, buying gift cards, and supporting stores.

7. Participate in IndiesFirst/Small Business Saturday. Stores can take advantage of special publisher offers, use social media assets, promote the Dan Rather (our IndiesFirst ambassador) event in support of indies, promote events, and recommend holiday gifts, including pre-orders. 

8. Take note of the final ABA coffee breaks of the year: 
   

   • Coffee Break: Tuesday, December 1, at 3:00 p.m. ET

   • BIPOC Coffee Break: Thursday, December 3, at 6:00 p.m. ET (email [email protected] for Zoom info specific to this meeting, and to volunteer to act as the host to let people in from the Zoom waiting room) 

   • Coffee Break: Tuesday, December 8, at 3:00 p.m. ET

   • Coffee Break: Wednesday, December 9, at 8:00 p.m. ET

   • Coffee Break: Tuesday, December 15, at 3:00 p.m. ET

   Booksellers who do not have the Zoom meeting ID and password can email [email protected] to get details. Booksellers are also welcome to email questions or topics for discussion ahead of time to [email protected].

9. Decide what your last day to ship will be for holiday purchases to get to recipients.
   Check out PartnerShip’s related shipping tips and take note: UPS and FedEx are already running a day behind in some areas of the country.

10. Review the red flags to keep in mind for credit card fraud. We’re seeing high levels of fraud. Make sure your team is trained on the red flags for both in-store and e-commerce fraud.

ABA is here for all of you. Please reach out if there is anything we can help with. Members can contact me directly, or email the Membership, Advocacy, or IndieCommerce teams.

Best,
Allison